News

Russian Railways has developed a policy for the digitisation of all processes and
invites all interested partners in this field to cooperate.

Oleg Belozerov, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Russian Railways, made this announcement
on 12 September 2018.

Belozerov was speaking at the session "Digital Transport - The Future of Greater
Eurasia," which was held within the framework of the IV Eastern Economic Forum in
Vladivostok.

"It is impossible to organise rail transport today without using digital technologies.
We want to utilise these technologies to attract new customers and offer completely
new services, and not just rail services. Seamless intermodal transportation technologies
are something that we will definitely be applying in the near future," said Oleg Belozerov.

According to Belozerov, the Company has adopted the basic documents on digitalisation
and implemented a programme for the introduction of digital technologies.

With regard to freight transport, digitalisation involves, among other things,
creating an integrated system of customer relationship management, including the electronic
trading platform Freight Transportation, which allows paperless and remotely ordered
transportation from point A to point B.

Thanks to information on the location of wagons not owned by Russian Railways and
the availability of the freight base, it has become possible to use the rolling stock
and railway infrastructure more efficiently and minimise empty wagon runs.

"Today, we are already seeing how effective this service is: nearly 3,000 shippers
have subscribed to the site, and the turnover now amounts to more than 10 billion
roubles," said Oleg Belozerov.

Belozerov also stressed that the introduction of digital technologies could reduce
significantly the time required to implement all operations, which is one of the main
customer requirements.

The site provides an end-to-end service, including multimodal connections and warehousing
services.

This range of services will expand in the future.

According to the CEO of Russian Railways, a similar approach to digitalisation
is also being brought to bear on the passenger side of the business.

The mobile platform enables passengers to book tickets, including for multimodal
routes, and order taxis, book hotels and other services.

In addition, Russian Railways is implementing a number of IT services for the Company’s
employees, in particular, a mobile application for staff who work on serving the infrastructure.
This app provides operational information on the need for the maintenance or repair
of particular parts of the infrastructure and makes it possible to transmit reporting
data.

Taking into account the fact that Russian Railways has a huge amount of information
on freight and passenger transportation at its disposal, the use of technologies involving
Big Data has great potential.

"The railways today are the biggest owner of information. We have a huge range
of work ahead of us and face ambitious tasks, but we can cope with them by using digital
technologies and the amount of information that we have," said Oleg Belozerov.